Dylan: His latest, here, starting at midnight.
David Gahr

Dylan: His latest, here, starting at midnight.

You could write a boring book — or a boring blog post, for that matter — about the countless ways the decline of the music industry has affected the way we listen to music. Record stores are disappearing, MP3 downloads are replacing CDs, piracy runs rampant, label mergers have consolidated artists' catalogs into ever fewer hands, and so on.

If that paragraph hasn't caused you to nod off like a herdsman bitten by a tsetse fly, perhaps you'll join me for a moment as I lament the decline of the CD release party, that wonderful byproduct of record stores that allows like-minded fans to gather in person and hear a much-anticipated album for the first time.